Battle of erroneous information in social networks: so far there are no winners
Battle of erroneous information in social networks: so far there are no winners
Facebook and other social platforms have been battling online disinformation and hate speech for two years. With the medium term of the United States. choiceOnly a few days later, there are signs that they are advancing, although they are still a long way from winning the war.
That's because the effort runs the risk of encountering contrary political winds Facebook, Twitter Y Google find bad for the business Some even argue that social networks are easy to flood with misinformation by design, an unintended consequence of their desire to serve advertisers by categorizing the interests of their users.
Caught shamefully off guard after being played by Russian agents who have meddled in the 2016 US elections, the technology giants have thrown millions of dollars, tens of thousands of people and what they say are their best technical efforts to fight false news, propaganda and hate that has proliferated in their digital platforms.
Facebook, in particular, has achieved a major change since the end of 2016, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that false news in his service could have influenced the election as "pretty crazy". In July, for example, the company announced that large expenses in security and content moderation, along with other changes in business, would slow growth and profitability. The investors immediately panicked and eliminated $ 119 billion of the company's market value.
The social network has begun to see some benefits for their efforts. A research collaboration between New York University and Stanford recently found that users' "interactions" with fake news on Facebook, which increased substantially in 2016 during the presidential campaign, were significantly reduced between the end of 2016 and July 2018. On Twitter, however, the exchange of such stories continued to increase in the last two years.
A similar measure from the University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility dubbed "Iffy Quotient," which measures the prevalence of "iffy" material on social networks, also shows that Facebook's "iffiness" has fallen from a maximum of 8.1 percent on March 1, 2017 to 3.2 percent on Monday. Twitter's confidence has also fallen slightly, from 5.6% in November 2016 to 4.2% on Monday.
Even at these levels, false news is still huge and can be extended to new audiences. A team led by Philip Howard, the principal investigator of Oxford's computational propaganda effort, examined shared stories on Twitter during the last 10 days of September 2018 and discovered that what was termed "junk news" represented a full room of all news stories. Shared links during that time - greater than the amount of professional news shared during that time.
The team defined junk news as sources that published misleading or incorrect information, often ideologically or conspiratorially, while not meeting criteria such as professionalism, bias, credibility and style.
While the Oxford analysis did not produce similar figures for Facebook, the researchers made a map of how the junk news circulates on the social network and discovered that conspiracy theories and other misinformation, once confined to a "correct" audience, now they are shared more freely among the principals. the conservatives too. (The Oxford team discovered that users who lean to the left have also developed a taste for junk news, but it represents only a small fraction of the material they share on Facebook).
Such studies offer imperfect images of what is really happening on social networks, since services generally do not offer researchers unhindered access to their data. Twitter, for example, disagrees with the Oxford study, noting that it used a public source of tweets that does not reflect the filtering that Twitter does to remove malicious material or spam.
Avoiding misinformation, of course, is not easy. Adversaries are always finding new ways to avoid restrictions. It can also be difficult to distinguish misinformation and propaganda from legitimate news, especially when world leaders such as President Donald Trump regularly disseminate falsehoods on social media.
Politics also complicates matters, as social media companies are eager to avoid charges of political bias. When Facebook, YouTube of Google and, finally, Twitter prohibited to the conspirator, Alex Jones, by several violations of its terms of service, Jones and its allies declared immediately that it was being censured. President Trump intervened a few weeks later with a parallel accusation, claiming without proof that Google and other companies were "suppressing the voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that are good."
In fact, Twitter denounces that researchers like the Oxford team define "junk news" too broadly. The group, for example, classifies conservative sites such as Breitbart News and Daily Caller as "garbage" according to their criteria. Twitter argues that prohibiting "media that reflects views within American society" could "seriously hamper public debate."
Some critics claim that the advertising-based business model that made Zuckerberg rich is also perfectly suited for propagandists. Services such as Facebook and Twitter "sustain themselves by finding like-minded groups and selling information about their behavior," wrote Dipayan Ghosh, a former privacy policy expert on Facebook and Ben Scott, New America's lead advisor, in an article. of opinion of Time magazine. at the beginning of this year. "Disinformation propagators sustain themselves by manipulating the behavior of groups with similar ideas."
"They do not self-regulate," said Dora Kingsley Vertenten, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California and CEO of the research consulting firm Trenton West. "They just want to make a profit, and what they have done to date is not enough."
Really fixing the problem of misinformation may require major changes in the way these services work. Users began spending less time on Facebook after making changes to make their service more "meaningful" to users, which meant less posting and more interactions with friends, the company said.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hinted that he is open to drastic changes, but has not yet said how they would look. And there have been no obvious changes since he made that statement in August.
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